Race-Baiting With a Twist

I trust Donald Trump’s political instincts more than I trust my own.

How could I not? In 2015, I thought the American right cared about “constitutional conservatism” and shrinking the size of government. Trump thought it cared about boorish performances of dominance and owning the libs by hook or by crook. I assumed most Republicans were classically liberal; he assumed most were crassly authoritarian or indifferent to civic tradition.

He was right, I was wrong. Mea culpa.

He wasn’t as right about how popular his brand of politics would prove to be with the wider electorate, but fairness requires us to admit he was more right than wrong about that too. He won the presidency once, came surprisingly close to winning it again, and overperformed his polling in both races. Amid all the hype about Kamalamentum this week, he still leads in national surveys and the RealClearPolitics’ polling averages.

The American mind is Trumpier than many of us would have believed 10 years ago. I’ll never look at the country the same way.

And so when Trump resorts to a political gambit that seems to me gross and counterproductive, the humility I’ve learned from underestimating him and overestimating the American people leads me to paranoia about what he’s seeing that I must be missing. 

“Is she Indian or is she black?” he wondered of Kamala Harris during an interview on Wednesday at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. “I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went—she became a black person.”

Not only is that not true, it’s the opposite of true. Harris was “black enough” in her youth to have attended Howard University, America’s most prominent historically black college. While there, she joined the oldest black sorority in the United States. If there’s evidence of her denying or downplaying her black ancestry in the past, I’m unaware of it. So are Republicans, presumably: The various cracks they made last week about her being a “DEI hire” weren’t aimed at the Indian side of her parentage, I suspect.

Trump’s comment at the NABJ convention turned out not to be an ad lib, but rather part of an apparently considered strategy to question how authentically black America’s first black vice president actually is. All day long on Wednesday, he and his Renfields in right-wing media highlighted moments from Harris’ past in which her Indian heritage on her mother’s side was emphasized, sometimes by Harris herself. “Unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are. I know where I come from,” sneered Trump lawyer turned populist “personality” Alina Habba, warming up the crowd at his rally in Pennsylvania.

There was even a birtherism cameo courtesy of Trump fanatic Laura Loomer, who posted a copy of Harris’ birth certificate on social media and noted triumphantly that nowhere does it say she’s black or African—merely “Jamaican.” Trump himself pronounced Loomer “a fantastic person, a great woman” at an event a few days ago.

The effort to muddle Harris’ racial background is still going as I write this on Thursday morning. “Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, appending an old photo of Harris in traditional Indian dress with some of her Indian relatives.

Why is he doing this? What is he seeing that I’m missing?

Eating the pieces.

Maybe nothing.

Donald Trump’s political ploys are not always driven by animal cunning, needless to say. In 2018, when he pardoned populist chud Dinesh D’Souza, BuzzFeed reached out to a former Trump administration official in hopes of understanding the strategic logic behind the move. There probably wasn’t any, the official told them. Trump typically doesn’t play “the sort of three-dimensional chess people ascribe to decisions like this,” he claimed. “More often than not he’s just eating the pieces.”

That’s the most popular theory online to explain his turn toward race-baiting Harris. He’s eating the pieces. Under stress as the race tightens, he’s resorting to the undisciplined wild-man flailing of his first campaign in 2016.

Like any rodent, an authoritarian demagogue will revert to instinct when cornered. And Trump feels cornered right now: His glide path to reelection was disrupted by the Democratic switcheroo, Harris is proving to be more politically agile than many of us expected, and he’s at dire risk of having Pennsylvania slip away if she selects Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Overcome with panic and frustration, he’s doing what comes naturally to a right-wing nationalist leader: He’s indulging his prejudices.

When he posted that photo of Harris in a sari, I bet his pupils were fully dilated.

But it isn’t hard to impute some Machiavellian strategic logic to him in this matter, if you’re so inclined. Whether Americans are willing to place a nonwhite woman from San Francisco in charge of the U.S. military is very much an open question, so it was inevitable that Trump would begin to look for ways to accentuate the “nonwhite” part. Starting a moronic argument over Harris’ ancestry serves his interests by refocusing voters on the fact that, wherever they might land on the “black or Indian?” question, they’re thinking about the fact that Harris isn’t white.

She’s not one of us. She’s the “weird” one. That’s Nationalism 101. It’s not a coincidence that Trump got his start in Republican politics noisily demanding proof that the first black president was actually born in America.

There’s also a certain sinister logic in impugning Harris as a phony, an eternal theme in Trump’s demagoguery even apart from questions of race. Two days after Joe Biden withdrew, with Democrats rapidly uniting behind the vice president, I predicted that “for the next three and a half months, the Republican message about her will be simply this: Everything about her is illegitimate. Everything.”

The essence of Trump’s narcissism, and of the right’s cultish devotion to him, is the belief that he’s some sort of invincible hero who can’t lose in a fair fight even though he’s never touched 47 percent in a national election. Everyone who impedes his path to power is accused of cheating or deceit of some sort, from the fakery of “Republicans in name only” who criticize him to the massive fraud supposedly committed by Democrats in rigging the 2020 election.

His two favorite words to describe his setbacks are “hoax” and “scam,” underlining his belief that he’s unstoppable unless his opponent stoops to chicanery. Go figure that he would eventually try to shoehorn Kamala Harris’ ancestry into that critique by questioning the sincerity of her own blackness. Everything about her is illegitimate—“fake! fake! fake!” to quote the man himself—including her racial identity.

There’s a third strategic virtue to attacking Harris in an ugly way: It steers the media spotlight away from her and back to Trump himself.

One might interpret that as another case of him acting on instinct under pressure, saying whatever he needs to feed his bottomless appetite for publicity. But there’s a method to the madness, as Jonathan Last explains:

Trump’s view of politics is that nothing can be accomplished without dominating cultural attention. It does not matter if people love you or hate you—you want them fixated on you. From there, you can figure out the angles. (And let the Electoral College do its work.)

…

For the 11-day span from Joe Biden stepping aside to yesterday, Donald Trump was invisible. Kamala Harris dominated the country’s attention and sparked the emergence of a genuine cultural movement.

Trump needed to get back on the screen in order to compete with her in the attention economy.

I thought that the race becoming a referendum on Joe Biden’s untested vice president instead of a referendum on Trump would hurt Democrats. That hasn’t been the case so far. Harris has performed well enough, and has been received with sufficient excitement, to have erased Biden’s deficit in some polls in less than two weeks’ time.

Maybe Trump feared that she was suddenly on her own glide path to victory and that he needed to do something dramatic to disrupt it, which he did. Harris has now temporarily been thrown off-message, forced to decide whether to get sucked into a counterproductive argument about her racial background or to ignore it and let Trump press his case on that subject unopposed.

Still, I don’t think any of these points get to the real strategic logic that’s motivating him.

Race-baiting with a twist.

Only in America could a right-wing demagogue adored by white reactionaries end up arguing that his opponent isn’t proud enough to be black.

The twist in Trump’s race-baiting of Kamala Harris is that it isn’t chiefly intended for his base, I think, the “one of us” factor notwithstanding. It’s intended for black voters, or nonwhite voters generally. He wants them to see themselves as victims of a hoax perpetrated by the vice president.

One of the great subplots of the campaign is how well Trump was polling with nonwhites by traditional Republican standards when Joe Biden was his opponent. Less than a month ago, a New York Times poll found him effectively tied with the president among Hispanics and pulling more than 20 percent of the black vote, all of which had left swing states like Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia firmly in his column.

Racial realignment has many causes, from high inflation to the GOP’s reorientation toward the working class to the left’s alienating enthrallment with cultural progressivism. As of a few weeks ago, it had remade the electoral map.

Harris’ sudden ascension is an X-factor. No one knows yet how much more a black Democratic nominee might appeal to black and Hispanic voters who’ve been flirting with the GOP, but Trump is doubtless worried about it—and he should be. The latest poll of battleground states has Harris suddenly leading by two points in Arizona and Nevada and tied with him in Georgia.

She stands a better chance than Biden of recapturing some of the gains Trump has made with nonwhite voters over the last two years. But at the same time, she’s nowhere near reassembling the racial coalition that handed Barack Obama two easy victories. As Ruy Teixeira pointed out in a post on Thursday, Obama won nonwhite voters by 64 points in 2012. Harris is winning them by just 34. The gap is even wider among working-class nonwhites, with Harris enjoying a 29-point advantage as compared to Obama’s 67-point victory the year he was reelected.

Trump has a real opportunity among nonwhite voters if he can hold down Harris’ margins as she scrambles to win them over. So he’s offering African Americans a reason to turn against her: She’s privately ashamed of being black, he implied in his comments on Wednesday, and chose to downplay that part of her ancestry until it became professionally useful for her to celebrate it. She’s always preferred to be thought of as Indian.

She’s scamming them, in other words, by pretending to identify with them now when she supposedly never did so before. It’s another hoax.

Republicans have had good luck in the past making laughingstocks of Democratic senators over their dubious assertions of racial identity, as Elizabeth “Pow Wow Chow” Warren could tell us. The difference is that Warren’s claim to Native American ancestry truly was “stolen valor” whereas Harris’ claim to black ancestry is not. And unlike with Warren, evidence of Harris’ pride in her black heritage didn’t emerge opportunistically later in life. As I noted earlier, it stretches back to her youth.

Insofar as media reports stressed the Indian side of her ancestry when she was elected to the Senate in 2017, there’s an obvious, mundane explanation. The media loves “firsts” and Harris was the first Indian American to join the chamber. She wasn’t the first black American to do so, or even the first black woman. The press focused on the more novel aspect of her identity, as it’s wont to do.

Attacking Harris for supposedly lacking black pride isn’t even the first time lately that Trump has tried pandering to a traditional liberal constituency by accusing prominent Democrats of having betrayed their racial or religious identity. In his zeal to exploit the anxiety some pro-Israel Jewish Democrats feel about the left’s influence on Gaza policy, he accused Chuck Schumer of having “become a Palestinian.” During a recent radio interview, when the host called Harris’ husband a “crappy Jew” due to his left-wing politics, Trump agreed.

Because Trump is amoral, he lacks the inherent distaste for identity politics that many traditional conservatives have. His approach to the subject is the same as his approach to everything else: Whether it’s good or bad depends entirely on whether it serves his personal interests. If he can plant a seed of doubt in the minds of black voters that Kamala Harris is less proud of her blackness than they are of theirs, driving a wedge between her and them, he’s happy to do it.

And a movement of lowbrow populists that believes his criminal rap sheet and history of fathering children with multiple women will endear him to African Americans is willing to back him to the hilt.

Will it work?

Baiting Harris on her ancestry seems to me more likely to cause black voters to feel defensive on her behalf than to persuade them to treat her as some sort of race traitor. And focusing swing voters on her lousy progressive legislative and prosecutorial record seems to me more fruitful than focusing them on whether “Jamaican” is a synonym for “black.”

My instinct, one shared by many Republicans inside the Capitol, is that a campaign preoccupied with the question of precisely how “colored” Kamala Harris is is repulsive and won’t fare well. It suffers from the same strategic defect as choosing J.D. Vance for vice president, stroking the right-wing id at the expense of alienating the voters who’ll actually decide the election.

But what is my paltry instinct worth relative to Donald Trump’s?

At this late hour in America’s decline, only a fool would confidently predict that a hallucination about Kamala Harris suppressing all evidence of her blackness until 2016 or whatever won’t electrify the electorate and convince them to prefer a coup-plotter with three indictments still pending against him. This country has more than enough damaged, unserious people to reelect him.

If nothing else, it’ll be fascinating to watch his army of trolls online and in right-wing media lend their support by feigning alarm and confusion about a concept as straightforward as being biracial. “You mean to say that Kamala Harris is somehow black and Indian—and can identify with either side depending on the cultural context? Whoever heard of such a thing?”

Except for the Republican nominee for vice president, that is, whose own children are Indian American on their mother’s side. Perhaps the ultimate loyalty test for J.D. Vance will come when Trump orders him to start wondering aloud whether there’s something inherently suspicious about being biracial. J.D. being J.D., there’s a nonzero chance that he’ll do it.

As for the populist minions who stand behind him and Trump, they’ve become quite good at willing alternate realities into being through sheer messaging exertion. Convincing Americans that a biracial person like Harris can’t possibly be proud of both parents’ ancestry if she once wore a sari in a photo will be a heavy lift even for them, but I don’t doubt that they’re willing to make the effort.

And if it doesn’t work, they’ve always got her birth certificate to scrutinize. “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him,’” Trump told a rally crowd recently, referring to the attempt to assassinate him. “No, I haven’t changed,” he quickly added. “Maybe I’ve gotten worse.” By the time this campaign is over, we’ll know how much worse he’s capable of getting.